


a redhead walks into a bar...

by xathira



Series: Beacember 2020 [1]
Category: Over the Garden Wall (Cartoon & Comics)
Genre: Bar Fight, Beacember 2020, Beast Wirt, Beefatrice, Violence, Woodswoman!Beatrice, but only for like a second, non-canon potuverse tho, potuverse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-13
Updated: 2020-12-13
Packaged: 2021-03-10 16:42:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28040328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xathira/pseuds/xathira
Summary: Beatrice throws down in a saloon.For Beacember 2020 ("Beefatrice" prompt)
Series: Beacember 2020 [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2043295
Comments: 5
Kudos: 24





	a redhead walks into a bar...

**Author's Note:**

> You don't need to have read my "Prince of the Unknown" series for this; it's a canon-divergent story anyway that just uses my personal "aesthetic" for Beast Wirt. The REAL star here is Beatrice (appropriate, for Beacember).
> 
> Hail Beatrice uwu

Beatrice kicked open the Salty Lizard saloon door with such force it slammed into the adjacent wall. The abrupt _crack_ of wood meeting peeling plaster had everyone seated near the entrance flinching and glancing sharply up at the redhead as she sauntered into the establishment; every glare held immediate, suspicious dislike; the previously tense atmosphere cinched even tighter, as though Beatrice were a badger that’d walked into a den of snakes. Predators, everyone… but a _new_ hunter had interrupted the grudging peace, and it was clear from her wide-hip swagger and the searing presence behind her hazel irises that she wasn’t about to show her belly.

“So,” the young woman called into the bristling hush, “this where a lady can find a good glass of whiskey?”

It wasn’t only her boldness that marked her an outsider of this town. She’d swept her flame-red hair into an updo that most would consider _severe,_ allowing spare curls to frame a face that was freckled by long days in the sun. She wore pants— _pants!_ on a woman!—that looked as if they’d been fashioned for a man, but which hugged the muscular trunks of her legs as intimately as if they’d been painted on. Her billowing dirt-dusted blouse was tucked sloppily into a waistband tied by a hasty length of rope; its collar flopped open just below the wings of her collar bones, revealing more freckled flesh striped with satiny scars. The angles of her shoulders cut an intimidating figure in the doorway. When Beatrice went to hook her thumbs into the rope about her waist, those closest to her could see the whip-cord steel of her forearms. A lady would _have_ to be wicked strong, to wield an axe like the one currently strapped to her back…

Nobody answered her question, except to spit on the floor. Beatrice eyed her audience with an eagle’s haughty assessment. One corner of her mouth curled into a half-snarled smirk. “Friendly town,” she huffed. And strode toward the bar at the back of the building.

The pianist at the rickety upright in the corner shivered a bit and returned to his jouncy drinking tune. A flock of soiled doves in secondhand corsets and lacy pantalettes tittered among themselves, watching Beatrice closely, before drifting out among the tables again. The badger wasn’t striking (at least not yet) so most folks dipped their faces back in their beer and pretended not to notice. If some broad wanted to waltz in here and cause a stir, well… that was her own problem.

At first, the greasy bartender ignored Beatrice when she propped her elbows on the bar and barked for a glass. He wiped a cloudy tankard with utmost manufactured concentration… until the freckled maiden loudly remarked what a shame it’d be if her axe happened to slip from her hands and into the bottles of liquor stacked along the shelves. 

“You’ll want to keep your voice down, ma’am,” the bartender suggested gruffly. His furtive eyes did not lift to hers while he took his time uncapping a bottle of Rattlesnake’s Crown: a whiskey indigenous to this town and a regional favorite. “Y’see, folks here’in Bronze Bluffs won’t _like_ a bird who sings too loud, if ye’ catch my drift…”

Beatrice observed the whiskey sloshing into its glass. She could feel about fifty daggers of hatred aimed at her spine, and all that tingling of danger did was bring a competitive grin to her features. The hungry expression startled the bartender with its incongruous prettiness; he hesitated to hand her her drink, as though he knew that giving it to her would be like pouring alcohol directly on a firepit. “A bird that sings too loud?” Beatrice echoed mockingly. Her hand swiped the glass anyway and she swirled the red-amber liquid with deft circles of her wrist. “Oh, dear. Whatever shall I do if people don’t _like_ me?”

She sipped flavors of burnt caramel and paint thinner without so much as puckering. It’d been a long, miserable trek through prairie and desert to get here… and Beatrice was losing hope. The thing that she and Wirt were hunting for wasn’t any closer, and neither was the person who might tell them where it was. If not in Boar’s Peak or Three Dead Dogs or Bronze Bluffs, then _where?_ If she had no more information to share after tonight, what would she and her anxious travel companion do? 

Beatrice imagined Wirt’s disappointment. _Don’t worry, Beatrice… maybe the next town?_ He’d give her those god-awful puppy dog eyes, too… ugh.

The liquor stung her mouth. Maybe the lead that Beatrice had sniffed out in Three Dead Dogs two days ago was no more than a mirage. None of the seedy cowboys or rat-faced merchants patronizing the Salty Lizard this evening struck her as promising… and the sportin’ women that kept tossing her coy glances seemed the sort to sell her a lie if it meant another pretty bauble to play with. Forget this. She’d slurp her whiskey and leave, let Wirt know that all they’d found was another disappointing road to nowhere. _Ho-hum, ce la vie and all that poetic garbage…_

A shadow slithered over her shoulder in the middle of her musing. Beatrice set down her glass and saw the reflection of an ugly handlebar mustache trembling in the dregs of her whiskey. 

“You’re not from around here,” announced a smoker’s phlegmy racket. (Sure, when Beatrice loudly asks for a drink it’s a _problem,_ but when some man wants to blow out her eardrums from two feet away it’s just _peachy._ ) “What’s with the axe, sweetheart? You huntin’ after some fellow who left you at the altar? Why dun’t y’give us a smile, and I’ll make you forget alllll about ‘im.”

The weight of an unwanted palm pressed on her shoulder. Beatrice gritted her molars. “Oh, for shit’s sake…”

First went her last few ounces of whiskey, flung over her shoulder into the pig’s beady eyes. He hollered in surprise—or tried to, because next came the empty glass smashing into his forehead. The cup crumbled on impact as if it’d been made of spun sugar. Brittle pieces stuck out from a ruddy mask of astonished idiocy. When the buffoon fell, dazed and bloody, he went down like a tree chopped by Beatrice’s mighty axe.

Utter silence shuttered the saloon. 

“What?” Beatrice shouted over her other shoulder. Her anger made the abrupt quiet wince, all those coiled snakes cringing around the stick she’d all but shoved into their nest. She jumped to her feet to face them all with fists raised. “Who else wants to put their hands on me? Is that what you inbred _hics_ do for fun?”

The painted ladies fled upstairs to their quarters on the second floor. Most of the Salty Lizard patrons gaped at Beatrice—insulted and horrified at her audacity—and a solid five seconds passed in which everyone simply stared at her set jaw and threatening posture. 

It wouldn’t be the wild west if at least _one_ person wasn’t willing to throw down.

A gila monster in chaps belted out a slurred swear and smacked his beer off the table he sat at. The foam hadn’t even hit his boots before he knocked a chair out of the way and charged Beatrice.

She didn’t bother to unsheath her axe. The redhead sidestepped her reptilian assailant and assisted him in sailing over the bar counter by clotheslining him in the throat and grabbing the collar of his shirt to throw him like a sack of potatoes. Five bottles of vodka crashed from their shelves when his tail whipped them on the way down. The bartender yelped and dove for cover. Oh, yeah. _Now it’s on._

Beatrice bolted from the bar to dance with a sneering coyote in the open area central to the saloon. He threw a sloppy punch at her face; she tackled him around the gut and catapulted them into the poker game happening directly behind him—shooting stacks of chips into the air. 

“GOT OURSELVES A BAR BRAWL, GENTLEMEN!”

“YEE- _FUCKIN’_ -HAW!” 

Canine teeth caught on Beatrice’s iron-tough arms. She hardly reacted to the dull tearing of skin, the smear of slobber on her sleeve, and instead delighted in using the fist that wasn’t knotted in the coyote’s cheap bolo tie to pound him five consecutive times in the side of his mangy snout. He yelped whenever her knuckles connected. Beatrice hit him some more until his jaws around her wrist unhinged—so he could spit his loose fangs into the spitoon near another coyote cowboy’s spurs. _Ting. Ting. Ting._

“You crazy heifer—”

A pair of paws yanked Beatrice’s hair just as she’d fisted her hands on her foe’s pointy ears to slam his skull against the table. The coyote she’d been beating on slumped unconscious into a scattered mess of cards and alcohol as she reflexively released him; the coyote pulling her hair hauled her bodily sideways so quickly the whole saloon spun. Maroon wallpaper. A ceiling pocked with bullet holes. Jeering humanoid and animal faces, howling for blood, booze and violence, and even as Beatrice fell across the back of a chair and threw up most of her whiskey she felt the savage urge to _give it to them._

She’d spent years of her life fighting scarier beasts than these.

“Slow down, missy,” growled the coyote who’d pulled her hair from its neatly wrapped bun. “If’n you _behave,_ might let ya walk on outta here.”

Beatrice blew a rust-colored coil from her sweat-slicked brow and wiped the bile from her crazily grinning mouth. Her head tilted as if she were considering the cur’s words. “Hmm… nah.” And she donkey-kicked him off his feet.

The rest of the coyote crew went down like bowling pins behind their alpha, sniveling and whining and tucking their tails like a bunch of whipped mutts. A javelina gang took one look at the sprawling dogs and scampered squealing out of the building. Every able-bodied patron stood at attention. 

“She decked Cotton-Eyed Joe…”

“She’s _insane…_ ”

“Who the hell is that?!”

Another contender rushed Beatrice as soon as she straightened up, as if he couldn’t wait to bruise her. She treated him to a signature miller haymaker—a dull, meaty thud traveled up the length of her expertly extended arm—the force of her knuckles bruising flesh, hitting bone, _breaking_ bone—the cowboy reeled back, eyes gushing like waterfalls, and he made a choked shout of pain as his crunched nose spurted a sudden fountain of blood. Red coated his chin and the back of Beatrice’s hand—but she’d already pulled her arm back, muscles cocked and ready to dole out another round of black eyes. She spent her time punching _trees_ to build up her endurance; a few fragile human bone structures meant nothing to her.

Two more mercenaries darted at her from both sides. Beatrice dispatched one with a roundhouse kick and locked the second in a flurry of punches traded so fast that her arms were a blur—blow after blow—they reeled around the floor like a pair of rabid wolves trying to tear one another apart. Their audience roared. Glass shattered. Furniture splintered. The pianist did his damndest to keep up with the chaos—fingers flying across the keys—but all at once the redhead and her opponent crashed into the wall beside him and he had no choice but to abandon his tune and flee.

“You’re right pretty,” panted the blond mercenary wrapping his hands around Beatrice’s throat. A glass orb occupied his left eye socket; it glared at Beatrice with an unnatural light—one that might’ve spooked her if she wasn’t used to staring into brighter, more frightening eyes. “I hate to kill ya.”

Beatrice gagged and writhed at the thumbs digging into her carotid pulse. Grey seeped into her peripheral vision. The mercenary chuckled, dark and low… till she gave up on shredding his knuckles with her fingernails and decided to sink her own thumb into the asshole’s remaining eye.

He let her go, screeching. Beatrice flipped their positions and steered him onto the ramshackle upright as if she were dealing with a bratty unbroken mustang. 

“You ever play piano?” she asked him sweetly. Without waiting for an answer, she slammed her straw-haired assailant face-first into the keys and dragged him by the scalp across five octaves. Notes jangled from low to high. The crazed woman didn’t release the musical bastard until his teeth met C8, at which point she flung him away and he collapsed—holding the front of his mouth and moaning—on the other side of the piano. 

God, she needed this! 

“YOU PSYCHO BITCH!” someone bellowed. Beatrice whirled—still smiling sunnily—to catch a man three times her size as he barreled bull-like toward her; in a single fluid motion she grasped his vest and hijacked his momentum to send him careening into the piano himself—which he smashed _spectacularly,_ fracturing polished wood and jamming keys as if the instrument had been crafted of balsa and toothpicks.

Beatrice cracked her knuckles and popped the vertebrae on her neck. The axe hadn’t slipped from its secure position on her back. She set her fists on her hips and surveyed the rest of the bar, hazel eyes crackling with fire. “So… anybody else got a problem with me? Step right up. I’ll serve y’all a piping hot _ass-whooping_ with that shitty whiskey.”

Amazingly, they kept coming. Beatrice was the flame that these insects could not resist—they would willingly _die_ for the chance to tangle with a once-in-a-lifetime tigress.

Who was she to deny their wish?

Ten more faces were acquainted with her merciless fists. At one point, the sheer number of enemies backed Beatrice into a corner—nowhere to run. Rather than panic, she awaited an opening…

“D’ya know why this place is called ‘Bronze Bluffs’?” A question spat at her by a frilled lizard, sporting (of course) brass knuckles. He clacked his weapons together and grinned. “You chose the wrong town to play in, honey.”

He bolted toward her. She eyed the stranger’s drunken gait the way a hawk calculates its killing strike. At the last possible moment she shifted her stance so that her dominant leg slid behind her; then she brought it up and forward—throwing her weight through her hip and down her thigh—and blasted the stranger’s knee as hard as she could. Inertia did the rest of her work for her: the man’s joint dislocated with a sound like a boot going through a pumpkin and he dropped cussing and hobbling on his wrongly back-bent limb.

Beatrice advanced. “Do _you_ know why they call me ‘the Woodswoman’?” The lizard swallowed roughly and flinched. Remaining contenders perked up at the title and traded furtive glances with each other. _Woodswoman… Woodswoman?_ True fear permeated the saloon’s thick smog of bloodlust. “You’ve heard of me, huh? All the way up in _Bronze Bluffs?_ Then tell me this: ya ever heard of the Jackalope?”

The atmosphere flash-froze. It was crystal clear that this woman was positively unhinged… but _that_ insane? No. Couldn’t be.

A black-and-blue stranger sprawled over a bench hacked a wad of blood at the wall. “Lady… you don’t want nothin’ to do with the Jackalope.”

Beatrice smirked. Tidied her shirt, brushed cigarette ash off her pants. Unbothered. “Wrong—pretty sure he wants nothing to do with _me._ But, since nobody wants to talk… I’ll be having my drink.”

At long last, the ruthless redhead sauntered up to the bar—unopposed. She slapped a handful of coins in a spot that wasn’t a puddle of vermouth and moonshine and frowned at the cowering bartender. “Whiskey neat. Something with a little cinnamon, if you’ve got it. That last glass was awful.”

“C… coming right up, ma’am.” 

He had to pour her drink twice; he dropped the first shot glass with shaking hands, and hurriedly went to refill her ice. Beatrice knocked back her prize and gasped in bliss at the spiced liquid fire slipping down her throat. It tasted of candied cinnamon with a trail of woodsmoke that curled around her tongue… and its buzz tingled within her almost immediately to soften the aches she already sensed creeping in. She inhaled another bracing breath and her tonsils burned. _Mmm…_

When Beatrice wiped her mouth, she was surprised to find a smear of crimson streaked along the heel of her palm. Oops. Must’ve split her lip at some point. A weary shrug, sliding the empty glass back to the bartender. “Another. I think I’ve earned it, yeah?”

He nodded. She’d earned it. 

︵‿︵‿︵‿︵‿︵‿︵︵‿︵‿︵‿︵‿︵‿︵ 

Beatrice left the Salty Lizard a wreck, not unlike the last bar she’d drifted in. What was it about these desert towns that pissed her off so much? Nobody had any _damn manners…_

No manners. No leads. No Jackalope. And Beatrice could guess how Wirt would react to seeing her tonight…

Bronze Bluffs had a cute inn near the edge of town, yet Beatrice marched beyond its yellow front door and onto the road leading out to the wilderness. Her boots took her off the dirt path… into the dry, rolling landscape of rock and dust… until civilization was a jagged silhouette cut into the sunset behind her. 

Night had properly immersed the desert by the time she arrived at her camp. The sky seemed a darker black than the sky at home, all the stars a clearer silver. Constellations appeared and multiplied the longer her gaze lingered on the vast canopy above her. Beatrice would never choose to live out here, so far away from her family and the forest she’d grown up in… but she appreciated this sharp beauty for what it was.

It required some careful rearrangement of her battered limbs to lie down on a blanket she’d bartered from a tribe by Boar’s Peak. Beatrice had _just_ gotten comfortable, hands folded on her stomach as she blinked dreamily up at the perfect river of glitter cast from north to south in the heavens…

“I smell… blood.”

A voice dark as shadow slipped around her, surrounding her like the watchful circle of a vulture. Out of nowhere a brilliant light splashed into the hidden camp to reveal Beatrice—wounded and alone—with her axe an inch too far to reach. She blew a harsh breath through her swollen nose. “Duh, Wirt. I’m bleeding.”

“You’re bleeding?!” 

Eldritch thirst replaced with maternal panic. Wirt materialized from the obsidian nothingness he usually hid in and kneeled at Beatrice’s side, claws hovering over her body as if he couldn’t make up his mind where to start patching her up first. The centers of his irises contracted into pulsing yellow pinpoints: a classic sign of his anxiety. Beatrice failed to hold back a scoff. Every time, this was his reaction. _Every time._

“Who? How?” Wirt—The Beast—fired out more questions, tone climbing higher when Beatrice hesitated to answer him. He actually stamped a hoof in frustration. _Uh oh._ He was upset. “I had a feeling it wouldn’t be safe… we should have waited for the next town—”

“Shut up,” Beatrice grunted. It was her way of telling him to relax, calm down, _don’t worry about me._ She had to slap away the talon he tried to graze over her split lip, and raised an eyebrow at his dithering. Wirt _tsked_ in response and lifted her chin to better categorize the damage.

“It isn’t worth searching if you always come back like this,” he told her hollowly. “We’re in this together. Partners don’t send partners out to… to g-get the crap kicked out of them.”

Beatrice brayed out a full belly-laugh that ended in a moan. “You should see the other guys!”

“Guys… plural?” Wirt grumbled. His eyes swirled into rings of feral color. “Who were they? I̬ ̯̿ŵ̻̠i̩ͮl̤l̞̜͚ͣ ̙̽f̰̭͛ìn̅ͤ̆d̳̯ t̆hem.”

Her hand found the curve of his jaw and rested there. “Heel, boy,” she commanded him. And The Beast reluctantly settled.

He lowered himself beside her, mirroring her position as he gawked up at the unfamiliar astronomy spread from horizon to horizon. When Beatrice slyly began to brush her fingertips over the newly bloomed cactus blossoms decorating his magnificent antlers, Wirt offered a mere warning growl under his breath. “You can’t start a bar fight in _all_ the towns we visit, you know.”

Her smile was dangerous and genuine. “Can’t I?”

Tomorrow, they would find another town to search, new people to question. Their trail would eventually lead them to their goal. For now, Beatrice had injuries to nurse and a friend to console, and at least another night to sleep and plot.

As long as the Woodswoman and The Beast were together… anything was possible.

**Author's Note:**

> Done for [Beacember 2020!](https://beatriceoftheday.tumblr.com/post/636680694147530752) I came up with all but the first (and best) prompt; "Beefatrice" was given by Tanicus, the wonderful author of Earth Angel (go read it).


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